WTF is on my Mind?!

By Mark Vicente

Author, Speaker, Whistleblower and award-winning Director Mark Vicente was behind the sleeper hit “What The Bleep Do We Know?!” Several books have been written about the film’s remarkable grassroot

... more

4.9

697697 ratings

FAQs about WTF is on my Mind?!:

How many episodes does WTF is on my Mind?! have?

The podcast currently has 123 episodes available.

Best of WTF is on my Mind?!

The most played episodes among Podcast App listeners.

Number 1: Inst@Guru: Bentinho Massaro Ep 13 - The Insane Text Messages Part 4
Inst@Guru is an investigative series examining Bentinho Massaro, a Dutch-born spiritual influencer, and the high-control dynamics inside his organization. It's built around the accounts of three former members who spent years close to him: Jacqueline Graham, Keilan McNeil, and Jade Alectra. Each brings their own texts, memories, and evidence to build a full picture of what actually happened, and why it's so hard to see from the inside while you're living it. This is part four of the text message series. Jacqueline, Keilan, and Jade go through their private conversations with Cory, Bentinho's right hand, and with Bentinho himself, in the aftermath of leaving his organization. Jacqueline shares her full exit conversation with Cory, the one where every doubt she raises gets reframed as a "visit" from a negative entity. Jade walks through what happened during an isolated retreat with Bentinho, Cory, and Paola, and what she describes as being groomed into treating consent as something to overcome. You'll hear what happened to Paola in the years that followed. Keilan shows the "plug the holes" damage control that kicked in within thirty minutes of a single online post, along with a threatening text from Bentinho to a former employee, and an older group chat that shows Cory's devotion to him years before any of this. I'm Mark Vicente. I spent twelve years inside NXIVM, the group HBO covered in The Vow. This series exists because Jacqueline, Keilan, and Jade wanted people to see how this actually works from the inside, not just hear that it happened. This is episode 13. If you haven't watched episodes 1 through 12, start there, this one builds directly on everything before it. I also just released Narcissist's Playbook, a documentary highly relevant to this series. https://narcissistsplaybook.uscreen.io/ Support the show The views and opinions expressed on WTF is on my Mind?! do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast or Mark Vicente. Any content provided by guests are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MarkVicente Website: www.markvicente.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@markvicente7 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markvicente/ X: https://x.com/markvicente TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mark_vicente Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/markvicente/
August 23, 20261h 38min
Number 2: Narcissism: When the Ego Goes Insane
This is a crossover episode between WTF Is on My Mind and Remember Your Greatness. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/remember-your-greatness-with-mark-vicente/id1838356198 People have watched me go from What the Bleep Do We Know?! to Narcissism, Cults, and Dark Psychology, and some have asked what the two have to do with each other. This episode is my answer. Narcissism is, in essence, the ego gone completely out of control. Spiritual and philosophical traditions have talked about the true self versus the false self for centuries, and I think Narcissistic Personality Disorder shows us exactly what happens when that false self becomes so disconnected from reality that it takes over completely. In this episode I talk about: - The difference between the false self we construct and the true self that feels more constant and eternal - The "I AM" state, and what happens when people touch that place of pure presence - How our thoughts can become completely detached from reality when we mistake them for our identity - Why communal narcissism can look like altruism and care when it is actually feeding a false sense of self - Keith Raniere's use of the word "pride," and why disabling healthy ego makes people easier to control - Why trying to destroy the ego is just another ego trip, and why that approach backfires - What cult leaders reveal about this pattern taken to its extreme Narcissism is a warning signal for what happens when we become spiritually dysregulated. Understanding it is not just about spotting it in other people. It is about understanding the same mechanism in ourselves. If this resonates with you, check out Narcissist's Playbook, our documentary featuring Dr. Ramani Durvasula, Dr. Heather Berlin, Richard Grannon, Evan Rachel Wood and a host of self-confessed narcissists, available to rent at NarcissistsPlaybook.uscreen.io As always, stay curious. Support the show The views and opinions expressed on WTF is on my Mind?! do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast or Mark Vicente. Any content provided by guests are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MarkVicente Website: www.markvicente.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@markvicente7 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markvicente/ X: https://x.com/markvicente TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mark_vicente Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/markvicente/
August 30, 202621min
Number 3: Inst@Guru: Bentinho Massaro Ep 1 - Jacqueline Part 1 'The Seeker'
I've seen this before. Not something like this. Not a similar version of this. This. The same playbook. The same psychological architecture. Just a different face. For the video version of this podcast, head over to Youtube. My name is Mark Vicente. I'm a filmmaker and a former member of NXIVM, the cult run by Keith Raniere, who is currently serving 120 years in federal prison. I was one of the whistleblowers who helped bring that organization down. That experience was chronicled in The Vow on HBO. This is Inst@Guru, a new investigative podcast series going inside the world of Bentinho Massaro. Dutch. Blonde. Blue-eyed. Charming. Self-proclaimed enlightened being. Claims his penis has healing properties. Claims he's going to awaken civilization by 2035. Believes he's Ra, an extraterrestrial being in human form, here to correct a cosmic mistake. He still has followers. He launched a new app in 2025. The machine is still running. At the center of this series are three people who were inside his world, some of them deep inside, some of them for years. They call themselves the Three Amigos. Their names are Jacqueline Graham, Keilan McNeil, and Jade Alectra. All three broke their NDAs, agreements carrying significant six-figure penalty clauses, because they felt they had no choice. I believe them. In this episode, Jacqueline Graham tells her story from the beginning. Not from Bentinho... from herself. From who she was before any of this: a Canadian mother of three, a raw vegan restaurateur, a lifelong spiritual seeker who genuinely wanted to understand the deeper nature of reality. She found Bentinho on YouTube in 2013. By 2019, she was his girlfriend. By 2020, he had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars of her money. This episode covers how it started. The teachings. The retreat in the Netherlands. The moment she watched the women around him fall apart and told herself: "I wouldn't act like that." The love bombing. The pedestalling. The first withdrawal. And the decision, standing in a hotel room in Panama after $80,000 had vanished overnight, that she was never going to doubt him again. That decision is where Episode 1 ends. It is not where the story ends. Bentinho Massaro, the invitation remains. Talk to me. Publicly. CAST OF CHARACTERS link coming soon. Want to go deeper? Join the Patreon community, people who understand this world, who engage with the work as it's being made, and who get behind-the-scenes access, early information, and invites to special screenings. Link below. Support the show The views and opinions expressed on WTF is on my Mind?! do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast or Mark Vicente. Any content provided by guests are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MarkVicente Website: www.markvicente.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@markvicente7 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markvicente/ X: https://x.com/markvicente TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mark_vicente Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/markvicente/
March 29, 202658min
Number 4: Inst@Guru: Bentinho Massaro Ep 14 - The Cult Assassin
For thirteen episodes, you've heard from the people Bentinho Massaro did this to. This episode is different. Carol Merchasin isn't a survivor, she's a lawyer, and some people call her 'The Cult Assassin.' If this conversation resonates, watch my documentary on narcissistic abuse, 'Narcissist's Playbook: Empathy Not Included' www.narcissistsplaybook.com Carol Merchasin is an attorney and advocate on coercive control and high-demand groups, and the founder of a litigation practice devoted to sexual abuse, trafficking, and coercive control cases against these organizations. She previously spent years as a partner at Morgan, Lewis, investigating sexual misconduct inside Fortune 50 companies. She's now president of the Board of the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA): www.internationalculticstudies.org In this conversation, Carol and I get into what coercion actually looks like when there's no physical force involved: the isolation, the indoctrination, the slow process of cutting someone off from every outside voice that could tell them something is wrong. We talk about why "why didn't you leave" is the wrong question, and why "it could never happen to me" is the most dangerous thing anyone can believe about themselves. Carol also walks through the legal side most people never hear: how a case like this actually gets built, what the Trafficking Act has to do with coercive control that never involves physical force, and why the NXIVM case set a precedent that keeps getting built on every time a new case reaches a courtroom. These organizations act like they're untouchable. They're not, and this episode is about exactly why. Support the show The views and opinions expressed on WTF is on my Mind?! do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast or Mark Vicente. Any content provided by guests are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MarkVicente Website: www.markvicente.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@markvicente7 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markvicente/ X: https://x.com/markvicente TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mark_vicente Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/markvicente/
September 13, 20261h 15min
Number 5: They Believe Their Own Lies: A Neuroscientist Explains Narcissism w/ Dr. Heather Berlin
I've been sitting with a theory for a while now: that dissociation isn't just what happens to survivors; it might be the actual cornerstone of narcissism itself. Not just what a narcissist does to the people around them, but something disconnected inside of them too, from their own shame, their own actions, maybe their own humanity. Watch Narcissist's Playbook: https://narcissistsplaybook.uscreen.io Join the Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/MarkVicente Dr. Heather Berlin: https://www.heatherberlin.com Dr. Heather Berlin was one of the experts featured in Narcissist's Playbook, and she joined us for our launch weekend, July 24th to 26th, for a live Q&A that left me with a lot of unfinished thoughts I couldn't stop turning over. So I brought her back to dig in a little deeper. We get into what dissociation actually is, why some narcissists can pass a polygraph while telling a bold lie because they've come to genuinely believe it, and why some seem to see other people less as people and more as objects, tools, even less than that. We also talk about the difference between refusing to look inward and being unable to, whether some of this is decided early in life or wired in from birth, and why the people who seek power the most are so often the ones who should have it the least. Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist, and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research explores the neural basis of trauma and dissociation, with a particular focus on the insula, the brain region tied to body awareness, and on depersonalization, the clinical term for the numbness and disconnection so many survivors describe. She's also a well-known science communicator, hosting PBS NOVA's Your Brain and appearing regularly on StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Her new book, The Fine Art of Losing Control, is available for pre-order now. Support the show The views and opinions expressed on WTF is on my Mind?! do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast or Mark Vicente. Any content provided by guests are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MarkVicente Website: www.markvicente.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@markvicente7 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markvicente/ X: https://x.com/markvicente TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mark_vicente Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/markvicente/
August 09, 20261h 3min